Disregarding Java for the moment...
If you want to answer the question "can cross-platforms UIs be made to
work?", do we really have to look any further than our web browsers?

And I don't just mean the HTML content, I'm thinking about the whole
application.  Chrome looks the same regardless of whatever OS it's running
on, as does Firefox.


Coming back to Java then; both Netbeans and Eclipse maintain pages listing
applications built on their respective platforms:

http://platform.netbeans.org/screenshots.html
<http://platform.netbeans.org/screenshots.html>
http://www.eclipse.org/community/rcp.php

<http://www.eclipse.org/community/rcp.php>These lists are by no means
complete, or even up to date!



On 13 September 2010 22:28, clay <claytonw...@gmail.com> wrote:

> OK, here are a few Java rich-client based apps that I've heard of
> through non-developer channels:
>
>  - Minecraft: All my gamer friends, most of whom are not into software
> development at all, are raving about this. I was shocked to see that
> it was actually made in Java. It is 3D as well. Very low-fi 3D, but
> still 3D. Beyond Micecraft there a few other good Java games (Revenge
> of the Titans) and some emulators written in Java.
>  - Interactive Animated Data Visualizations. I was reading one of my
> favorite business + economics web sites last month and they linked
> some really cool interactive data visualizations, that were implmented
> in Java (I can't find the link). HTML is standard for basic charts
> with very limited animation + interactivity. Flash is the most popular
> for more rich content, but Java is the third most common runtime for
> this.
>  - Baby Names. The second link on Google for "baby names" (no quotes)
> is NameVoyager which is a really neat name data visualization
> implemented in Java.
>  - Maple, the mathematics software toolkit. Largely done in rich
> client Java.
>  - Interactive academic applets. For the college classes that I've
> taken recently, many of them feature interactive applets that
> demonstrate some concept.
>
> Two technical showpieces
>
>  - ThinkFree Office Suite: Obviously, this never achieved success, but
> technically it's very impressive. If, hypothetically, this was a free
> application, and they removed the ads and intentional restricions on
> saving to their servers rather than to local disks, this would be a
> better rich client office suite than OpenOffice or, for my purposes,
> Microsoft Office. Then again, I have already switched to Google Docs
> as my primary office authoring suite.
>  - MoneyDance: I replaced Quicken with this in the past. I've since
> moved on to web-client, cloud-hosted mint.com, which makes much more
> sense than a rich client, but back before mint.com, MoneyDance was an
> excellent commercial desktop app. Worked great on Linux and Windows.
> The interace was definitely nicer than Quicken ever was.
>
> You already dismissed it, but IDEs are a shining example. I have met
> serveral completely non-Java PHP, Python, and Ruby developers using
> either Eclipse, NetBeans, or IntelliJ. Those tools are widely regarded
> as expertly designed products with very complex user interfaces.
>
>
> On Sep 13, 2:49 pm, Casper Bang <casper.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That is not my experiences, you generally can NOT just expect a Swing
> > app to look and feel correct all over. I have written a fair amount of
> > Swing and it's more complex and slower performing than native
> > bindings. You'll find the menu bar wrong placed on Mac, widget
> > background discolored on Linux, EDT paint issues etc. So this is
> > actually about the only point I agree with Steve Jobs on; native
> > widget toolkit is the only way to go if you want to make your users
> > happy.
>
> Of course, writing software from the ground up on a native GUI SDK
> produces better results than using a higher-level cross platform
> abstraction or a port from a different GUI SDK. That's generally known
> and not debated. But that doesn't mean native GUI SDKs are "the only
> way to go". There's a trade off: finer points of quality and
> performance and integration vs. cross platform support.
>
> So, if you agree with Steve Jobs on this, why are you so evangelical
> about MonoTouch, when that obviously adds a layer of abstraction
> between the application and the underlying native SDKs? Even the
> fanatical .NET + C# developers that I personally know who are doing
> iOS hobby projects have begrudgingly used Objective-C and showed
> little interest in MonoTouch, precisely because they want to avoid an
> added layer of API and complexity to support.
>
> > Yet look at how well they are doing; invading Linux, Android, iPhone/
> > iPad etc. I still say you will be hard pressed finding popular Java
> > desktop applications beyond the developer crowd but I guess we'll just
> > have to agree to disagree.
>
> So, you suggest that desktop Java isn't doing well, but Mono is? May I
> ask for your list of runaway successful or technical impressive apps
> written in Mono? I see the stuff on the Wikpedia page like F-Spot,
> Tomboy, and Unity, and of course Mono dev tools like MonoDevelop,
> MonoTouch, and MonoDroid... Is that it? That's not very impressive.
>
> I thought, the purpose of Mono, was to spread and evangelize Microsoft
> technologies and build Microsoft developer mindshare, by "invading
> Linux, Android, iPhone/iPad", as you put it. At that, I guess they are
> successful...
>
> May I ask, have you done much Mono development yourself, or is this
> all from stuff you've read from Microsoft evangelist channels?
>
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-- 
Kevin Wright

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